The basic thought that concepts indicating elements in a social system like king, or a particular type of social system like kingdom, may include an independent role for possibilities can be found in another book from 1978. While Elster made possibilism his central concern in Logic and Society, Stinchcombe included it almost as an afterthought, expressed for the first time in the conclusion of Theoretical Methods in Social History. It is as if it were obvious. Perhaps it is. But only a limited number of people have noticed it.
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To say that an army is men obeying does not make it (ordinarily – outside times of revolution) a random concatenation of whims. For the whole point is that people’s definition of the situation they are in is powerfully determined by what situation they are in, and that is an institutional product. It was not the whim of the eighteenth-century French nobility that they should defend their privileges through parlements and turn over their public functions to an (noble) Intendent. Likewise, it was not a whim but a mode of production combined with technical changes that led hundreds of textile capitalists to make up their minds to decrease the ratio of spinners to helps on the machines.299
‘Thus the question,’ Stinchcombe goes on to say, ‘is not whether we need structural concepts, but what we should build them out of’.300 So, for Stinchcombe it is a question
of semantics. The picture I have been building in relation to Elster is one where we try to see the constituent parts of our ‘structural concepts’ for what they are – possibilities. Stinchcombe glosses his previous examples to show us what he takes to be the
significance of the question of semantics:
What an army consists of is a system for maintaining the definition of the system, in each soldier’s mind, that says he had better obey – the way armies break down in revolutions cannot be understood otherwise. What a mode of production consists of is what capitalists cannot help doing if they are to stay in business and make profits on their investments. What the public role of the nobility consists of is what they think they can do in parlement and what they think they can do in collecting taille for us in local welfare over the opposition of the Intendent, who is obliged to send some of it to Paris. Thus these structural concepts – army, mode of production, nobility – have their causal force because they systematically shape people’s cognitions.
299 Stinchcombe 1978: 118 300 Stinchcombe 1978: 119
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Some of this is familiar and some if it seems confused. The examples are helpful if contentious. Stinchcombe’s point about armies (in each of the paragraphs I have just quoted) reiterates the idea of ‘routine politics’ we encountered above. Indeed, it might be seen to offer a little more than a reiteration. While the point is partly the same – that terms like ‘army’ derive from routine situations – Stinchcombe also seems to suggest that this gives the ‘routine’ a certain priority over the ‘non-routine’ in so far as the latter cannot be understood otherwise than as a breakdown of the former. Now, it may be that the dynamic relationship between a pre-civil war and civil war set of politics is an extremely complicated one.301 Yet, as long as there is a relationship this would seem to
make the previous, more settled circumstances an essential part of the explanation for what goes on in the war. The non-routine is understood here in a way that is parasitic on the routine – as its breakdown.
What ‘capitalists cannot help doing if they are to stay in business’ is another example of conditional possibility: certain actions of the capitalists are a condition for the set of possibilities implied by the survival of their business. The very existence of the nobility itself depends on its members having a certain view of what it is plausible for them to do in relation to political institutions and tax affairs. They do not face direct coercion into their role, but the force of circumstance means that taking a realistic view involves some compromises. So, one source of possibilities here is the practical reasoning of actors themselves. However, Stinchcombe also finds possibilities in the very logic of sociological concepts: what he calls the ‘causal force’ of these concepts depends on their being built out of aspects of ‘people’s cognitions’. Let us examine this.
301 Kalyvas 2006. A major theme of Kalyvas’ exhaustively documented analysis is that pre-war alliances can change radically when a civil-war begins and as it progresses; nonetheless, the change from peace to war along certain – perhaps unpredictable lines – is part of the explanation for the distribution of civil-war violence.
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The idea of a sociological concept itself having ‘causal force’ seems rather confused. Stinchcombe means that it is a connection with the real concerns of individuals in historical societies which gives sociological concepts some purchase on what here he presumably wishes to call ‘causation’ in these societies. So what he means directly is that things happen, or that people do things, not that they are caused in a sense which adds any depth or generalizability to one’s intuitive grasp of the connection between sequential events. Perhaps unknowingly, Stinchcombe acknowledges the difficulty of speaking simply in terms of ‘causation’ by saying later in Theoretical Methods in Social History that we need to chance ‘guesses about the place of particular acts in the causal scheme’.302 His point is effectively that we cannot get a detailed grasp of fine-grained
causation but that we may be able to suggest how acts influence and are influenced by their “causal” surroundings. So, rather than providing a social physics, we are to ask about the connection between the use of mules in yarn production in India and the ‘effect’ this had on the proliferation of weaving factories in Manchester during the industrial revolution. Later we will consider a systematic way to think of this as something rather different to causation; for now, though, consider that all Stinchcombe really needs to say is that ‘history is just one fucking thing after another’, as one of Alan Bennett’s History Boys puts it, and that he – Stinchcombe – can make some sort of sense out of why.303
What is directly important about Stinchcombe’s rather briefly put view for our concern with possibilities is the idea that possibilities somehow constitute and are therefore
implied by sociological concepts:
The list of bedrock subjective concepts, out of which structural concepts are developed, usually consists of concepts of common-sense psychology: possibility (Can soldiers get
302 Stinchcombe 1978: 122-3 303 Bennett 2006
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away with it if they do not fire on the crowd?), constraint (How can a capitalist produce enough yarn?), reward (Will a capitalist make more profit with larger mules with many child-helpers?), effectiveness (Will the village land council let a peasant keep the land he just got?), causality (Did Russia lose to the Germans because of betrayals in the tsar’s court?).304
Again, the idea of ‘causality’ here is doubtful: there can be no direct causal link between betrayal and the loss of a war, even if betrayal might be identified as the main factor which explains such a loss best. If instead we are willing to treat the internecine betrayals at the tsar’s court as conditions of the German victory, there is a case for saying that Stinchcombe identifies only modal concepts as the basis for sociological concepts – perhaps despite himself. Betrayal is a condition that makes certain actions leading to victory possible. Continuing peasant ownership is made possible by council decisions. A mode of production is defined by the conditions (particular details of production) which make profit possible. A technique of production is invented in face of a historically limited set of possibilities. Individual soldiers decide whether rebellion is, plausibly, worth the risk. What we learn about by interpreting historical material with sociological concepts, on this view, is the context of possibility within which actors acted. Further commentary below will help us examine the idea that we may take a stronger interest in this context of possibilities than in the directly factual material which demonstrates it to us. However, Stinchcombe’s notion of structure is as gentle as Redfield’s notion of ‘system’. It can only be used to sum-up some actions and a
situation – not to indicate some sort of independent cause.
Nevertheless, Stinchcombe introduces his thought about possibility as one of his final comments, and consequently he does not develop it very deeply. It is suggestive but not terribly helpful to be told, as Stinchcombe does in summing-up, that Kenneth Burke
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described institutions or modes of production as a ‘grammar of motive’.305
Stinchcombe is more interested in the motive part, because his purpose is to show that structural concepts depend on the subjective realities of the individuals whose action and social life we are trying to explain. Part of his point is that these subjective realities need grasping in a detailed way, and that ‘grand definitions’ in terms of cosmic values (such as a Calvinist ethic alone) are not fine grained enough and do not explain why people keep acting as they do. The explanatory gap has two aspects. Firstly, the potential of a cosmic value has to earth to become real energy, so we have to explain why it does so in a particular way. Second, it is hard to imagine individuals being motivated by cosmic values alone if they are not filtered through some goals and rewards which are more proximate to them. ‘Grand definitions’ of societies based on sweeping accounts of their values ought to be examined at the level of individuals, their real circumstances, and their actions.306
Consequently, Stinchcombe takes us a little closer towards understanding the role of possibilities in sociological concepts. His analysis is more throwaway than Elster’s. Yet, his instinct that we are left without a certain line between the possible and the impossible is a useful caution. He thinks that using sociological concepts like king,
kingdom and army means making judgements about the psychology of the people whose behaviour is indicated by such concepts. This tempers Elster’s harder
“possibilism”. It offers us the thought that judgements about possibility are built into our use of such concepts and that, thus, we always have to check back with the details to see if we are using them correctly. The concepts themselves cannot themselves show us what is possible or impossible.
305 Stinchcombe 1978: 119 306 Stinchcombe 1978: 119
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Montaillou contains some sociological concepts, not least domus/ostal and cabanes. Later we will return to examine how they introduce certain possibilities into the make- up of the book. However, Montaillou is not just constituted by sociological concepts. It also contains descriptions of actions, people, and the broader environment in which the village rested. These further elements introduce possibilities into Montaillou, but they do so in different ways to sociological concepts. To see how they work, and to see how they combine with the more sociological aspects of LeRoy Ladurie’s thought, we need to extend our discussion of possibilities to include them. To do so, we can return to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to Italy and Geoffrey Hawthorn’s discussion of the importance of possibilities in understanding the Maestà, an altarpiece created by Duccio di Buoninsegna after having been commissioned by the cathedral of Santa Maria in Siena on 9th October, 1308. This will take us back for a while to the time, if not the
place, of Montaillou.